Respuestas

BTW, you might want to know before you open the case that the battery you are replacing is labeled "ML1220/2E2E0X", which is a small watch-style cmos button battery soldered to a wire pigtail, so it's ready to plug in. They can be found on ebay or Amazon; if you're paying more than $5 including shipping, you're being ripped off. Another option is un-solder the original, find a generic ML1220 battery, and then solder the old pigtail connector to it, using shrink-wrap tubing to seal things back up. [This battery is probably identical to the very common CR1220, both being 3V lithium button batteries. Dunno. Switch to a different model if you don't mind the uncertainty and risk.]

I played around with these connections before sealing my machine back up. With no antenna cabled onto the tiny bluetooth board, I found I was unable to discover my Mac from my adjacent cell phone. But the bluetooth capability still showed up in the System Profiler, of course, despite the lack of a signal. So then I popped the connector off of that bluetooth board and connected the antenna to the "Aux" post on the Airport Extreme card. As I'd suspected, the System Profiler then couldn't find any bluetooth subsystem at all. So, the verdict: the Bluetooth board is the correct place to attach the secondary antenna in the A1176, despite some confusion. (At least one person is confused, since I got my used Mini with the Bluetooth antenna attached to the "Aux" post). Whether attaching a secondary antenna to the "aux" port might help the Mini get a strong signal is something I didn't look into. The idea Ralph found at maclife.com of threading an aux antenna out of the back is intriguing though, especially since I...

Good to hear; I'm going to try the same thing. The mostly-working Mac Mini A1176 I just picked up also has a failing optical drive. It seems to have no problem with CDs and CDRs; occasionally reads DVDs and DVD-ROMs but usually spits 'em back out, and never accepts DVD-Rs or DVD+R/DLs (purple substrate). The existing drive claims to be a Matshita UJ-846-C (aka Panasonic) and is also labeled Apple Super 846CA. Checks seem to indicate the UJ846C costs around $50 on eBay and more at retail (although it seems to cost $199.95 here on ifixit). But several Panasonic UJ-846-Bs are selling for much less over on eBay, so I'm going to try that first.

Comentarios de Guía

Sometimes rust isn’t the crucial problem, but years of accumulated gunk. I picked up a pan at a yard sale that had a thick coating of cooked-on oil, etc., everywhere but the cooking surface. The first thing I did was put the pan in the oven and turned on the self-clean cycle, which raised the temperature high enough to oxidize all that stuff off. It stunk to high heaven, but since it was summer I just opened all the windows and went outside and read for a few hours.

A friend in the restaurant biz later told me they deal with that problem all the time, and just put the pan on a high-temp gas burner and let it get absurdly hot (not quite red hot), with the ventilation on high. That might be preferable to using an oven’s cleaning cycle. Dunno.

After that, you’ve probably got a rust-free pan, and if so you can jump to Step 4.

It took me a while to realize this while reassembling, but my replacement screen didn’t have a “housing” for the front-facing camera. I finally spotted a clear plastic piece in the broken screen, which provided a circular collar that was the camera housing. I was able to take it out and snap it into the equivalent spot on the replacement screen.

As David notes, socket M and socket P aren't the same. If you want to spend a lot of effort on it, Google their differences. The Wikipedia page for Socket M points to a CPU-World article that states there’s only a single pin difference, but for most of us that is a plenty big barrier.

Hi. I'm afraid I can no longer answer the question "does it matter in any way", since I eventually upgraded to a new Mac Mini.

I can say that it didn't *seem* to matter, which means no software failed to run or performed noticeably poorly because of the upgrade. But I'm not especially performance sensitive, so it is possible that all/most/some software was running in 32-bit mode and not taking advantage of the higher throughput of a 64-bit architecture. The most CPU intense stuff I was running when I decided to upgrade was: Parallels running WinXP and some Windows-only legal software, along with Chrome with far too many tabs open, and iTunes. That proved to be too much, and it'd slow to a crawl too often. But I think the upgrade kept me on that iMac and extra two or three years, and was an interesting exercise.

I taped the "Mac Mini Logic Board Removal Tool" to the flat part of the antenna plate before sealing everything up again. I mean, where else am I supposed to store it without forgetting where it is? I'm pretty sure it won't cause any problems there.